The Party's Over

In the 1960s, teaching was a challenge. Today, vocationally oriented students and careerist colleagues make it a chore.

By Leonard Quart

I had an instinct for how to get the class actively involved—raising questions about how the moral and psycho-logical dilemmas of characters in films and novels connected to their own familial, social, and work lives. I did this without turning the class into a quasi-therapeutic session in which students subordinated the analysis of a text to endless talk about how oppressive high school was or how little their parents understood them.

I had real affection for the majority of the students I taught: mainly long-haired, pot-smoking, overall-wearing white working- and lower-middle-class kids from Staten Island, Bay Ridge, and Bensonhurst, although there were also housewives who returned to school despite their husbands’ objections, radicalized Vietnam veterans wearing green army-fatigue shirts fresh from combat, and a few black students and upper-middle-class, elite-school dropouts sprinkled into the mix. Most of the students were uncertain and self-doubting about their capacity to write a paper, speak publicly, or rebel against authority. They were usually the first in their families to go to college, and came from homes with few books or cultural and intellectual interests.

It was the sixties. Many of my students were antagonistic toward American society and struggling to define for themselves an alternate set of values— sexual, occupational, psychological, and political—from the ones in which their parents and high school peers believed. What I loved about them was the intensity and honesty of their confusion—the sense that they were groping toward some large life changes like, in one student’s words, "frightened birds seeking a common wind." They pursued their goals without indulging in facile talk about "doing one’s thing" or joining some sectarian "revolutionary" organization. When militant Students for a Democratic Society leader Mark Rudd visited our school and delivered a hard-line rap attacking capitalist exploitation and "pig police stations," the students were turned off by his being "heavy" and macho.

The turbulence of their own emotional lives and their wariness toward authority did not make most of them serious academic students—the kind who complete assignments and pursue a subject in depth by heading for the library to delve further into it. But they were intellectually and emotionally involved in classroom discussion, and when I taught a Doris Lessing novel or an Ingmar Bergman film, they became personally engaged in her rebellion against the banality and racism of colonial society, or in his evocation of how intricate and painful relationships between people are.

Those were my most exhilarating teaching years, for my commitment went far beyond the classroom to creating an experimental curriculum that ranged from the foolishly faddish like encounter groups and arts and crafts to serious interdisciplinary courses on American society and modern views of man. We also struggled to form a faculty-student community around the concept of participatory democracy. It was a noble idea, but few of the participants knew how to work collectively. We had people leaving the group in a snit if a vote went against them, wasting valuable discussion time with narcissistic arias about being unappreciated for their contributions, or not showing up at all because their other careers as therapists, writers, hedonists took precedence over institutional work.

I continued to have a life outside school—a family, friends, passionate cultural interests—but the job consumed me. I could not stop talking about the ins and outs of educational philosophy, college politics, and the personalities of the students and faculty with whom I spent my workdays. There was the avant-garde sociologist who lived in his office for a while because he wanted to minimize his material needs; another sociologist who taught courses on how to rip off the system and ironically wasn’t rehired because he was too drunk and "high" to meet his classes; and the students who went on a sensitivity weekend and found it so revelatory that they felt themselves instantly and blissfully transformed, until they were rudely awakened by returning to their daily work and school lives.

There were also late-night phone calls from students about relationships that had soured, depressions they couldn’t deal with, and political strategies that had to be devised. Much that transpired in our attempt to create a radical alternative to the usual college education was hypo-critical— students’ demanding conventional rewards (high grades) for courses that eschewed traditional standards—and masochistic—self-criticism sessions that allowed faculty to tear at each other’s personalities and behavior ("insensitivity" was the greatest sin) in the name of creating more honest work relationships. Still, I loved the moment, the feeling that we were working collectively to build what I thought was something imaginative, something that was truly going to reform university education. In one student’s words, "We were trying to take education out of a compartment and integrate it into our whole living experience." Our goals may have been quixotic and ultimately futile, but the unpredictability and chaos of the process energized me and moved me to question some of my deepest beliefs.

Those first twelve years or so were the high point of my teaching career, but I continued to teach in a sometimes inspired, always committed manner in the years that followed. I taught a wide range of courses from American culture, literature, and politics, to twentieth-century European literature, to Holocaust and urban film, always trying to make connections between different disciplines with all the knowledge and intellectual passion I had at my command. My specialty was film, but I never felt rigidly tied to an academic field, because my college, which had been founded as the City University of New York’s experimental institution, gave me the freedom to teach what I felt most fervent about.

Although the students came from the same social class backgrounds as they did in the late sixties, they were now more dutiful and less anarchic, attending class with greater regularity and completing their written assignments. They were also less provocative and intellectually stimulating. They rarely challenged what I said in class, and it was the uncommon classroom hour when intense debate over a political issue or a critical interpretation of a work of art occurred. The students docilely took notes, but the existential psychodramas of the sixties classroom had become something more pedestrian: students were primarily interested in acquiring degrees and getting jobs, a few of them intellectually serious, the majority marking time.

I remained, however, a good citizen at the college, actively participating in various committees, and even serving as chair of my department for a semester. I was now writing a great deal, so teaching was no longer my prime source of creativity. And I felt my imagination and passion increasingly going into my writing rather than the classroom.

About five years ago, my whole relationship to the job radically changed. I continued to prepare carefully for my classes, but my desire to perform and excite the students had diminished. The college also felt altered. Many of the people I began teaching with had retired, and were replaced with younger, more ambitious, and more narrowly professional academics. These were people whose career building, despite their embrace of identity politics, often had priority over a passion for social, political, and aesthetic issues. (Of course, they were hired in an era in which jobs were scarce, competition cutthroat, and the pressure to produce academic books and articles unrelenting, so that the notion of a deeply linked community that once animated me had no place in their professional lives.) They were generally bright, good teachers and knowledgeable about their subjects, but I felt they were of a different breed.

I entered the academy as a generalist and teacher, who had always been a deviant in my profession. I rarely attended academic conferences or net-worked, did not write for academic journals, and made the school and the students and a serious, but nonacademic, film magazine, Cineaste, rather than the discipline, my prime commitment. As academic film study became increasingly enamored with various theoretical models (for example, structuralism, deconstruction, and cultural studies) and specialized, obfuscating vocabulary, I became even further alienated from the discipline. Today, I continue to write accessibly written film criticism, in a manner that I hope moves my readers to respond more perceptively and deeply to the world that a film creates.

Yet my alienation from the academic discipline was not sufficient reason to retire. I suddenly discovered when I attended college committee meetings that my mind began to wander, and I found myself—for the first time in thirty years—totally removed from all the talk about budgets, curriculums, and the college’s future. My detachment was magnified by a profound case of death anxiety that for several months back then made everything I dealt with seem meaningless. At times, I felt I had become a character in an Antonioni film, and all of reality seemed to turn into a gray, viscous fog that I couldn’t penetrate.

When the depression passed after several months, I found that I remained disconnected from the job. And though I could have continued meeting my classes until I reached sixty-five, I had always felt contempt for colleagues who cynically treated the job as a paycheck. So I’m retiring, without conflict or remorse about the decision. Nevertheless, after giving a lifetime to an institution, I’m disturbed that my departure moves me so little. It’s been a good, even an ideal, career that has allowed me to get paid for talking about my deepest passions without having to teach in accord with anybody’s standards but my own. But I’m burned out and feel like an anachronism—an old-fashioned humanist and a self-styled public intellectual who has no real place in today’s university. I once fantasized that I would celebrate my retirement with a large party out of Fellini, where all the colleagues and students who were important to me would reappear and would do one last circle dance. That was when I felt part of the institution. That time has passed, and it seems like the right moment to retire.

Leonard Quart is professor of cinema studies at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also contributing editor to Cineaste and coauthor of the just-published third edition of American Film and Society Since 1945.

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